A licence to print money

If you WANT TO SUCCEED, REALLY SUCCEED – then more of your marketing ‘experiments’ will fail than succeed.

Keep a record of everything you try in marketing. Your Black Book (the file of EXPERIMENTS that fail), is actually more important than your White Book (the EXPERIMENTS that succeed).

Do you have the courage for this? What separates those who succeed in business from those who fail, is the way they respond when their marketing experiments fail. Mediocre business people can’t stand it when their marketing fails, they give up. If that’s you, change your attitude. Successful business people see each failed marketing experiment as one step closer to finding out what works. And when you finally discover what works in marketing your business, you’ll have a licence to print money.

You will discover that your Black Book (your file of marketing experiments that fail) quickly gets much fatter than your White Book (your file of marketing experiments that succeed). You will also be amazed to discover that the file of failed marketing experiments is more valuable than the ones that work. If you intend to make serious money in your business as a result of marketing, you will need to try many approaches – and most of them WILL fail. And that’s exactly what is supposed to happen. Each time you run an ad, a website, a telemarketing campaign, a brochure, in fact any marketing experiment that doesn’t work, you are one step closer to finding one that does.

Only change one element in your ad, website, brochure or sales script, at a time.

If a marketing person suggests you inject “fresh ideas” push them off the highest bridge you can find! Show no mercy, because marketing is science, not art. In science you don’t keep introducing ‘fresh ideas’. That’s baloney. In science you change one thing, only one thing, at a time. That way, when your experiment finally works, you know why! The ‘fresh idea marketing experts’ keep wiping out what you’ve done in the past, and instead of learning anything from your past marketing, they replace it all with a whole new ‘fresh idea’. Thank God that Edison wasn’t as stupid as them. He changed just one element of his experiment at a time. If he’d kept adding 'fresh ideas' we’d still be waiting for the lightbulb to be invented.

America’s top sales people, the ones who earn million dollar plus salaries, say that for every “YES”, they expect to hear “NO” five times. When Edison was asked, “How did it feel to fail 1999 times?” his astonished reply was, “I didn’t fail 1999 times. I documented 1999 ways not to make a lightbulb.”

"Magic Johnson scored more NBA Basketball shots than anyone else – but he missed more than anyone else, too. Edison tried 1999 experiments to make a light bulb before he found the ONE that worked. Only change one element of your ad at a time - this way you will discover – one experiment at a time – what doesn’t work and what does.

If you want to measure your marketing, then you need to act like scientists do. This means you must change just one element of your ad, or brochure, or sales script, or website at a time."

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